But such a transfigured Catholicism is a mere shadow Catholicism, not the Church but a phantom of the Church. Its upholders are compelled at every step to employ various weapons, to ward off any triumph of their enemies and avoid disturbing the faithful in a religious sentiment artificially compounded of error and truth combined. The more the notion of the supreme glory, and even infallibility, of the Pope was developed, the greater solidarity with the past became requisite, that the history of the Popes might not be suffered to bear witness too strongly against such views. To quote a significant phrase in constant use here during this winter, “the dogma must conquer history.”(81) A contest has arisen, not of dogma but of a theological opinion against history, that is against truth; the end sanctifies the means. It was held allowable in order to save the Church and for the interest of souls to commit what would in any other case have been acknowledged to be sin. Not only was history falsified, but the rules of Christian morality were no longer held applicable where the credit of the hierarchy was at stake. The very sense of truth and error, right and wrong,—in a word the conscience—was thrown into confusion. Thus, _e.g._, when Pius V. demanded that the Huguenot prisoners should be put to death, he did right, for he was Pope and a Saint to boot. Since Charles Borromeo approved the murdering of Protestants by private persons, it is better to approve it than to call his canonization in question. Or one moral aberration is got rid of by another. Many of the leading Catholic writers of this century deny that Gregory XIII. approved the massacre of St. Bartholomew,(82) or that heretics have ever been put to death at Rome. This spirit, which falsifies history and corrupts morals, is the crying sin of modern Catholicism, and it reaches high enough. Of the three men who are commonly held in France to stand at the head of the Catholic movement, one wrote a panegyric on Pius V., another under the name of _Religion et Liberté_ attacked absolutism in France while defending the double absolutism in Rome, and a third vindicated the Syllabus—all three thus manifesting the influence of this deplorable spirit.